Tripe, Tongue or Tobă

This week, I go on my inaugural once a month peregrination and I am so excited! A friend of mine is coming too, and as of yet, we have nothing planned except maybe a trip to a winery. From what I can glean from a quick search online, Timișoara is known as “Little Venice” as well as “the City of Flowers”, has loads of churches, was apparently the first European city to introduce horse-drawn trams and electrical street lighting, and was the first city in the Banat region to host a beer factory. It’s going to be pretty epic.

Local food is obviously important to research when learning about new countries. Some Romanian culinary highlights include: tripe soup, polenta with hot milk, cow tongue with olives and, my personal favourite, tobă also known as “head cheese”, which is apparently a pig’s stomach stuffed with pig’s feet, ears and meat from the head suspended in gelatine. But all is not lost, the desserts seem to be a much stronger category, with baklava, rahat (Turkish delight) and amandine (chocolate sponge filled with chocolate and almonds and glazed with even more chocolate), plus there’s lots of local wine and cheese to choose from. However, as I’m supposed to be abstaining from sugary stuff over Lent, and as I’m not particularly keen on tripe, tongue or tobă, it looks like I’ll have to exist solely on wine and brânză (a type of cheese, not of the head variety) – oh well.

It’s only Monday, but so far this week I’ve been rejected for two more pupillages. Both were for very good chambers and I should have known better than to have applied to them in the first place. However, again the most upsetting part of the rejection process is the lack of compassion. Today, when calling to request feedback, I was told by one of the chambers that as there where are so many applications “they just blend into one”, so as a result, it would not be possible to provide any comments whatsoever. Ironic that when drafting the applications you have to tailor them precisely to each chambers, weaving in references to their ethos, pupillage structure, key cases and the members you find most interesting, but when responding to your application, you are just another anonymous applicant, indistinguishable from a perpetual pool of other faceless failures.

My quote of the day, when asked if it was possible to move departments because I am unhappy and unfulfilled, I was told that I should not progress this any further as, “departments get protective over their paralegals” and that such a move would cause “political problems”. Given that most days I feel of very little/no worth, it is interesting to learn that my department has such a strong allegiance to me. Maybe all those degree have paid off, maybe I’m just so efficient at scanning now that they cannot imagine life without me… I’ve never felt so important, empowered and necessary in a job before, this is truly a big moment.